If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and stolidly
misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs,
I’ve yet to encounter it. Yes, films like Citizen Kane and 2001: A
Space Odyssey have had more ink spilled over them, but most of the ideas
tossed about are on the money, and far less is read into them. Also, they have
one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great
films. While Straw Dogs is not nearly as good a film as its hagiographers
claim- for Peckinpah had all the subtlety and psychological depth of a
sledgehammer, nor is it as irredeemable a bit of pornography as it detractors
insist, it is, above all, a very dull and mediocre film. This is not a word- dull,
that has likely ever appeared in a review of the film, but what else can one
call a film that telegraphs its end in the first twenty minutes, and has all the
realistic character development of a Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoon? Excuse
me: let me rescind that. Wile E. Coyote, at least, plumbs some true existential
angst.

By contrast, the nearly two hour long Straw Dogs is not even that
innovative and certainly not ‘naturalistic,’ for the ultra-violence it
depicts was done better (and strangely, even more realistically) in Stanley
Kubrick’s deeper and darker humored A Clockwork Orange- released the
same year, and earlier by Peckinpah, in The Wild Bunch, by Arthur Penn,
in Bonnie And Clyde; its scenes of cretins trying to break into the lead
characters’ home are pale echoes of George Romero’s masterful low budget Night
Of the Living Dead, and even the Vincent Price horror classic, The Last
Man On Earth (and it’s remake, the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega
Man); and the revenge theme done more engagingly in Wes Craven’s campy
debut film Last House On The Left- sans the guilty pleasure, and more
deeply in the film Craven was inspired by, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin
Spring. It acted, however, as a springboard for other films showing
increasingly stylized violence, such as Deliverance (1972), Death Wish
(1974), and Taxi Driver (1976)- films with different styles and artistic
merits. As well, the film’s politics and psychology are badly dated. This is
especially true in the infamous ‘double rape’ scene. Compared to Alfred
Hitchcock’s Frenzy, released a few months later, Peckinpah’s
motivations seem downright silly, which is especially noteworthy since Hitchcock
built a career on Freudian pseudoscientific motivations for his criminal
characters, yet abandoned that all for realism in his underappreciated 1972 gem.

Not
surprisingly, the misinterpretations of the film start right away with the
title. It is commonly assumed that Peckinpah took the title from a passage from
the Tao Te Ching:

Heaven
and Earth are impartial;

They
see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.

The
wise are impartial;

They
see the people as straw dogs.

The straw dogs referred to were tiny effigies used in ceremonies that
were burnt and discarded at the end. But, if this is the true source, the title
is rather lame, for none of the characters in the film serve any vital role in
any ritual. Also, linking mediocre art to greater source material is a standard
way that many artists try to cover their failures with a patina of depth. A more
likely provenance for the title comes from the simple colloquial American slang
that a straw dog is a seemingly frightening thing that turns out to not be so
frightening- i.e.- a dog whose proverbial bark is worse than its bite. This
interpretation gives the title an added irony that seems more in keeping with
Peckinpah’s temperament. After all, the bespectacled lead character, David
Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), a mathematician with a grant, ends up having a bite far
worse than his almost nonexistent bark.

Yet, even if the title can be seen in a deeper and more ironic light than
most critics give it credit for, the film fails because the screenplay, by
Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman- based upon Gordon Williams’ novel The
Siege Of Trencher’s Farm, is simply very poorly written; larded with one
dimensional caricatures- especially of the cretinous male townsfolk (who sing
drinking songs of sex with sheep and are fascinated with rats), implausible
actions, and the male fantasy character in the form of David’s big breasted
nubile blond goddess English wife Amy (Susan George). Worse, the acting does
absolutely nothing to liven up the bad writing, as Dustin Hoffman turns in what
may be his worst acting performance up until the ridiculously bad Rain Man.
Legend has it that Hoffman loathed the film and took the part only for the
money, and it shows onscreen. Susan George is just another blond bimbo, despite
some critics’ attempts to make her performance seem notable. Ask yourself
this, as you watch the film: is there any scene that George is in that one could
not imagine any other actress doing as well or better?

The actual plot is very slight. The Sumners have left the U.S. for
Amy’s Cornish hometown, but he is resented by the xenophobic locals- the
ostensible reason that he is a nebbishy American who has bagged a local goddess
who spurned a former beau, Charley Venner (Del Henney). Amy is a terminal flirt
who wears no bras, struts her stuff in front of the local Neoliths, including
flashing her lovely breasts out a window at Venner’s workmen pals, hired by
the Sumners to fix their garage roof, out in the countryside. If she is a local,
should she not know that they are lustful monsters? Does this not suggest that
she wants their attentions, and the violence concomitant with it? Or is she
really as dumb as she seems? David seems to be a wimp who has no convictions on
politics- such as the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War, which the locals
query him on. Those locals include Venner’s cretinous pals Cawsey (Jim
Norton), Riddaway (Donald Webster), and Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), and the
patriarch of a sick family, named Tom Hedden (Peter Vaughan), whose teen son
Bobby (Len Jones) and teen daughter Janice (Sally Thomsett) are incestuously
involved, and like voyeuring on the Sumners. Janice also apes Amy’s over the
top sexuality, by showing off her younger charms, and trying to seduce the local
idiot, Henry Niles (an unbilled David Warner) who was once guilty of molesting
young girls, and whose brother John (Peter Arne) has avoided institutionalizing
him. Tom Hedden loathes the Niles clan, even though his family is as sick. In
fact, all of the English villagers are sick, in some way, including Amy, and
this fact shines through the film in her claims to hate being ogled, yet does
everything to encourage it. The lone exception to this seemingly genetic
inbreeding is the town constable, Major John Scott (T.P. McKenna).

Amy tries to spur David to act more manly, and this is especially true
after the locals kill the Sumners’ cat, and hang it in their closet. Some
critics claim David killed the cat, but it’s clear from his initial reaction
to it that he is wholly unaware of it, for it is the same visceral reaction he
had to earlier violence at the local bar. She subverts his attempts to corner
the workmen into admitting their deed, and, in reaction, he accepts their
invitation to go birdhunting the next day. This is when Venner goes to the
Sumner home and the infamous ‘rape scene’ occurs. Unfortunately, the
character of Venner does not rape Amy, just as there is no rape scene of Tippi
Hedren, by Sean Connery, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. It is a classic
violent sex/seduction act. She says no, but her body says yes, as she leans up
against Venner, and rubs against him. When he rips her robe, and he tosses her
to the couch, she simply lays there and makes pouty lips at him, before writhing
her body to him to accept his thrust, long before one could declare such an
action a mere physical response to orgasm. She does not scream nor resist, and
gets even more passionate as the violence rises. Feminists may not like it, but
many women do get turned on by rough sex, where a man dominates them, especially
after they’ve put up token resistance. When he penetrates her she has visions
of sex with David, and when he comes they lay side by side, cuddling. This is
not a rape. She loved the sex, and only hated her loving it, for Venner is more
overtly manly than David- right down to his brawny chest hair. When he is done,
however, he becomes an accessory to rape when his buddy Norman wields a gun and
Venner holds Amy down as Norman doggies and sodomizes her. Only during this
scene is she being fully resistant. But, we have seen her at her worst- the
eternal cocktease and harridan who loves emasculating her husband, the faithless
wife who invites violent sex to ‘get back’ at David’s impotence (if not
sexually than emotionally), and then the bitch who gets her comeuppance when
Venner assists his crony in sodomizing her. Of course, all the men in the film
will get far worse than Amy does, but Feminista apparently stopped watching the
film at this point, content that they had ‘proof’ of the film’s and
director’s intent.

There are some brief scenes which show her laden with guilt and
shell-shock, when the Sumners go to a church outing, after David intellectually
destroyed the local preacher, but that leads into the final scenes, where Henry
is taken out and seduced by Janice after she, yet again fails to attract
David’s attentions. There, in a barn, she is accidentally strangled by Henry,
reminiscent of the scene from John Steinbeck’s novel, Of
Mice And Men, where the brutish idiot Lenny accidentally kills a girl.
Running away, Henry is hit by David as he drives Amy home in the foggy night.
They take him to their home where the lynch mob of cretins longs to string him
up over the disappearance of Janice. David succeeds, at first, in tossing them
out- ironically defending the idiot against the two men who he does not know
assaulted Amy, and who are even more loathsome than the idiot pedophile, but Tom
Hedden has his boys begin an assault to get back in. Finally, Major Scott
arrives, but Tom Hedden accidentally kills him in a rage, and the rest of the
cretins, having nothing left to lose, do their best to get into the home.

Susan resists David’s attempts to save the idiot, and betrays him by
trying to let the cretins in, until David acts ‘manly,’ slaps her, and she
falls into line. He explains that they have nothing to lose, after the death of
the Major, and that if they get in they are both dead, along with Henry. Still,
she does everything she can to undermine David, who resorts to household
appliances and boiled oil to fend off the cretins. Soon, they get in, and David
and Amy lock themselves away further into the house- just as in Night Of The
Living Dead. David ends up killing all of the men, and when he tangles with
Venner, daring Amy’s ex to shoot him after he’s beaten another man to death,
Amy calls out for David and Charley when Norman tries to rape her again. David
and Venner run upstairs and confront him. Norman suggests that Venner kill David
and the two of them do Amy again. Instead, Venner shoots and kills Norman, he
and David wrestle, and David kills Venner by nearly decapitating him with a
steel bear trap.

Then, in the tritest fashion, just as David thinks they are safe, a final
cretin attacks him, and after much fear and deliberation, Amy finally shoots the
last of them. The triumphal David- as if there was ever any doubt?,picks up his cracked eyeglasses, leaves Amy alone, and drives
Henry off to the authorities. The ending is famed, and justly so. In the car,
Henry says, ‘I don’t know where I live.’ David smiles and says,
‘That’s all right, neither do I.’ If only the rest of the film had the
subtlety and enigmatic poesy of that ending Straw Dogs would truly be the
masterpiece its acolytes proclaim.It’s not, for a number of
reasons, aside from the predictable and trite characters and plot. The
cinematography, byJohn Coquillon, and the
editing, by Paul Davies, Roger Spottiswoode, and Tony Lawson is not up to
earlier Peckinpah standards. The use of slow motion, in this film, is not nearly
as effective as in The Wild Bunch because it extends the triteness and
lame situations, rather than focusing on the pain. When Venner and David fall
down a stairwell struggling over his rifle, there is simply no need for it
because a) it is in the dark, b) it releases some of the adrenaline the scene
has been building, before the climax, and c) it’s simply not filmed that well.
Similarly, earlier, when Venner slaps around Amy, before their sex scene, there
is no reason for it, because it does not detail her pain nor eroticize her body.
Similarly, when Venner penetrates Amy, we see shots from her point of view,
which are clearly filmed in an attractive fashion- another point which argues
against her supposed horror at being raped. This is all onscreen and not too
difficult to miss…unless you are a critic merely aping others or popular
sentiment and not really watching the film. The score, by Jerry Fielding,
neither heightens nor distracts, thereby rendering it functional, at best.

The two disk DVD, by The Criterion Collection, is a good package
that has some clunker features in it. On Disk One is the film and a terrible
commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince. The film is well transferred, in a
1.78:1 aspect ratio, and includes an isolated music and effects track, for
unknown reasons. Yet, Prince’s commentary may be the worst I’ve ever heard,
even worse than the insipid Annette Insdorf’s execrable commentary on Krzysztof
Kieslowski’s Blue. It’s as if every bad critic for the last
three-plus decades has been distilled into this inane monologue. There is not a
single aspect of this film that he does not misinterpret, even when the evidence
contradicts him onscreen as he speaks, for Prince is not interested in objective
analysis, but hagiography of a film he calls a masterpiece. For instance, he
parrots Peckinpah’s claim that David is the villain of the film. Why?
Well, neither director nor critic can explain that, but it sounds provocative,
and is the sort of red herring that artists like to toss out to the stolid to
feed their interest in art that otherwise does not engage on its own merits.
Thankfully, he does reject the idea that David is the Machiavellian cat killer
who manipulates all the violence in the film.

Unfortunately, he does buy into the noxious notion that all art is a
biographical corollary to the artist, that David is somehow a representation of
Peckinpah, his own rages and fears of masculinity, and his own ambivalence
toward marriage. Thus, he sees the Sumner marriage as a bad one, although we see
that theirs is actually the only successful male-female relationship in the
whole film, even more so than a brief snippet of the local preacher and his
wife. Simply because they argue and snipe does not mean the marriage is bad,
which only begs the obvious- has Prince ever been married? For, if not, it would
explain much of that misinterpretation’s provenance. At film’s end, when Amy
takes a few moments before shooting the last assailant, who is attacking David,
Prince sees this as evidence for their bad marriage, when it’s clearly the
character’s fighting through her trauma to try to act. When David also brings
Henry in, rather than comfort Amy, Prince also sees this as their marriage
unraveling, yet David is also shell-shocked, as well as betrayed by Amy a number
of times. To expect him to act normally, in the abnormal reality of the film, is
simply silly. Likewise, he takes a hard line on the supposed rape of Amy by
Venner, mouthing the usual banalities and misinterpretations, even though- as
stated, it’s clearly not rape. Much of his ‘analysis’ is of the sort where
an egghead reads some deep significance into an eye gouge in a Three Stooges
comedy short

Disk Two is better, and has all the supplements, including an 82 minute
documentary calledSam Peckinpah: Man Of Iron, a 26
minute long vintage film of Dustin Hoffman on the set of Straw Dogs,
behind the scenes footage, interviews with Susan George and the film’s
producer Daniel Melnick, selected correspondence between Peckinpah and his
critics (Time magazine’s Richard Schickel and The
New Yorker’s Pauline Kael) and viewers, as well as three tv
trailers and the original theatrical trailer for the film. The booklet insert
comes with a 1974 Canadian print interview with Peckinpah by Andre Leroux, and
an essay by poetaster Joshua Clover, which is almost as ridiculously bad as the
commentary by Prince. At one point he even claims this:

One might do best by calling it a war movie; StrawDogs is
unthinkable without recourse to Vietnam. Made in 1971, little illusion left
about the nature of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the movie invokes
the conflict namelessly almost from the start. The campus troubles Amy and the
‘uncommitted’ David have left behind can be nothing other than anti-war
protests.

This is a patent absurdity. It’s like claiming Paradise Lost is
a critique of Cromwellian England, yet lacking anecdoture for support. Merely
because David has left the U.S., and is an American in a foreign land does not
evoke Vietnam War parallels, for he is not a Colonialist. But look at the feeble
attempts of Clover to justify his claim. Well, we know that David has also
gotten a grant, which could have had residency requirements, plus he’s simply
a White Liberal type with a penchant for travel, as we learn. But even if we
accept that he came to England to avoid the draft, or make a political
statement, the rest of the demented violence of the cretinous Cornish locals has
no direct parallels to Vietnam. None.

In his defense, the stolid Clover is not the only critic who has
butchered their interpretation of the film. The infamous Pauline Kael loved the
film, but mislabeled it ‘fascist,’ as if a band of local loonies are the
equivalent of a nationwide junta, and many of her female acolytes condemned the
film and director for ‘misogyny.’ Even the powerful Roger Ebert muffed his
criticism of the film. While he correctly thought it one of Peckinpah’s weaker
films, especially in relation to The Wild Bunch, his reasons were
unfathomable. He wrote: ‘The most offensive thing about the movie is its
hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on
the moral outrage with a shovel.’ The very thing that sticks out about the
film is that it is amoral. The characters are shown doing crazy and violent
things and little consequence is shown. That is not hypocrisy, it is anarchy.

Overall, the film is well crafted, but lacks any real depth or power, and
is especially wan with all the decades of intervening filmic treatises on
violence. Peckinpah was simply not that deep a filmmaker. And lesser films on
violence are almost always dull. This film proves the rule. In a sense, he was a
more barbaric version of Alfred Hitchcock, who was similarly fascinated with
violence; although Hitchcock’s films were generally less scattershot in
quality than Peckinpah’s. Neither man, however, had the depth to truly plumb
artistic greatness. If they ever achieved it, however briefly, it was
happenstance, not design. Straw Dogs is plagued by its simpleminded
script, and unrealistic characters and situations, and wallows in gray
mediocrity.

But, its own seriousness is what makes the film far less enjoyable than,
say, Last House On The Left or Night Of the Living Dead. The
former film is so silly and unpretentious that its images and violence lodge in
the viewers’ mind- such as the infamous fellatio biting scene, while the
latter film is simply relentless pedal to the metal violence that is
inexplicable. Straw Dogs should have been more realistically grounded,
more campy, or more straightforward in its naked bile for mankind. As it is, it
sits on the fence, and is so predictable that it’s actually dull. There’s
not a moment where a viewer can core into any of the characters and care for
them, or even identify with them. Note that Peckinpah will show the starts of
violence, but never the results- we see no real penetration of Amy, by either
assailant, and we do not see David’s actual violence. The camera always looks
away- even when he is tossing grapefruits at his cat. While this may seem
commendable on the director’s part, or a sense of ethos, it also neuters the
visceral effect of the violence, so that we get, in effect, a serial killer of a
film tidied up for children, thus showing all the fun of violence with none of
the consequences. Thereby it is not a statement of ethics, merely an unjustified
and poor artistic choice.

In short,
being controversial does not always equate with quality, and Straw Dogs
seems more and more like a puerile attempt to simply shock (which it no longer
even does), yet one with pretensions of something deeper- it is an ok B film
with a better pedigreed director and A film production values. Ironically, that
very lack of pretense is why a film like Last House On The Left works
better, and a film like Night Of The Living Dead touches far deeper into
the human psyche and far richer into true art. Shock filmmaker David Fincher (Fight
Club), a manifest Peckinpah acolyte, once said, ‘I’m always interested
in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I've
never gone swimming in the ocean again.’ Well, aside from his love of a rather
routine and trite Steven Spielberg thriller (though the director seems to have
gone all downhill since then), Fincher’s dictum is not met here, for even the
controversy of the alleged ‘double rape’ and the violent ending seem,
nowadays, to be much ado over very little, as not a single image sticks out in
viewers’ minds, not even the film’s blurred opening of kids in a playground,
which quotes Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch. When an artist cannot
even equal his earlier glories it’s a sure sign of a lesser work of art.
That’s what Straw Dogs is, no matter how one interprets its inner
workings.